


Wilson's Disease

by InkStainsOnMyHands



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Chronic Illness, Doctor!Shane, Doctor/Patient, Falling In Love, Feelings Realization, Hallucinations, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Medical Drama AU, Patient!Ryan, Shane is basically House
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 10:35:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14851140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InkStainsOnMyHands/pseuds/InkStainsOnMyHands
Summary: Shane had never been here before, outside of a patient’s room, hand on the door, willing to enter the spacevoluntarily.Dr. Shane Madej was good at his job, and that afforded him special privileges, such as being excused from the rituals normally performed by other, less-renowned physicians. While he tended toward allowing his team of residents to monitor his patients after a diagnosis and treatment plan had been reached, for some inexplicable reason, he slid the door open to Ryan Bergara’s room.Or,Dr. Shane Madej falls in love with his former patient, Ryan Bergara.





	Wilson's Disease

**Author's Note:**

> This is super awful, but here's the House AU no one wanted.

Shane had never been _here_ before, outside of a patient’s room, hand on the door, willing to enter the space _voluntarily._

 

Dr. Shane Madej was good at his job, and that afforded him special privileges, such as being excused from the rituals normally performed by other, less-renowned physicians. While he tended toward allowing his team of residents to monitor his patients after a diagnosis and treatment plan had been reached, for some inexplicable reason, he slid the door open to Ryan Bergara’s room.

 

Ryan’s chocolate brown doe-eyes flitted up to Shane’s looming figure approaching his bedside. He smiled, and the warmth of that expression burned Shane’s stomach. Why was he striding in here again?

 

“Am I finally ready to head home?” he asked so innocently, so sweetly, Shane felt his heart quicken. (Shane made a mental note to make an appointment with his cardiologist.)

 

Shane swallowed passed the lump in his throat.“Uh, no, not quite. I still want to monitor you, at least until we can make sure no permanent damage was done to your brain.”

 

Ryan rolled his eyes and laughed. “You can’t convince me that me believing in ghosts has anything to do with my disease.” He then took a bite from the tray of food seated before him. “See? I don’t think my food is poisoned anymore, but I’m still a paranormal blogger.”

 

Shane gave a high-pitched chuckle, and the sound was foreign even to his own ears.

 

Ugh! Who was he becoming?

 

Shane kept people at a distance, not for some narcissistic, misanthropic reason, but because he worked better when he thought of his patients as machines he needed to fix.

 

Then, this _boy_ had to come here and try to ruin the career he had worked so hard to cultivate!

 

(It still made his eyes heavy to think of the unsuccessful surgery he performed on him. Afterwards, when it was evident that Ryan was still ill, he screamed and punched and slid down the wall until he rested into a fetal position.)

 

Shane coughed, dragging himself out of the memory. “Just because one delusion is cured, doesn’t mean you’re all better.”

 

“Ha-Ha, so funny, you should be a comedian,” Ryan joked. He took another bite of food. “So, when can I go home?”

 

“We need to get the biopsy results from your liver test to see if you need to be placed on a transplant list,” Shane replied.

 

Ryan visibly paled.

 

At the sight, Shane quickly amended (without much thought),“ - But, considering how you’re doing, it’s unlikely that will be necessary, I think we caught this thing before too much damage was done. You’ll need to take medication for the rest of your life, but copper should be properly flushed out of your system from now on.”

 

Ryan reached an arm out, and at first, Shane could only stare at the muscular appendage in bemusement. It took longer than it should to realize the man was asking for an embrace. He stepped forward to lean into Ryan, hugging him as best as he could with the other man sitting up against his elevated hospital bed.

 

“Thank you, for everything,” Ryan whispered in Shane’s ear, and the doctor suppressed the shiver that threatened to shake him. The two men pulled away from one another, despite it feeling unnatural.

 

Shane had never felt such a magnetic pull like this. As a sexual being, he’d had the urge to kiss people before, but this was different. His lungs were weighed down as if they required Ryan to breathe life back into them. Stepping away from the boy, from the proximity of his mouth, felt like he was forced to defy gravity.

 

But, he did, and he did not plan on returning so long as Ryan remained in the hospital.

 

Shane needed to be a mechanic.

 

* * *

 

It only took a few days for the next puzzle to present itself.

 

Shane’s residents, seated around his conference room table, rattled off various symptoms and associated diagnosis’s. Quickly, the attending shot up from his chair and headed to the whiteboard; he needed to work the pieces out by jotting down the best ideas.

 

Shane picked up the dry eraser to wipe out the previous array of ailments. His hand hovered over the first line: _Delusions,_  with a doodle of a ghost drawn beside it.

 

That had certainly been interesting.

 

Ryan had been brought into the ER after collapsing while attempting to vlog his ghoulish adventures. At the time, he claimed a spirit had attacked him and drained him of his energy. The rest of Ryan’s crew weren’t so convinced and begged that he be seen.

 

Sara, the attending ER physician, sent the blubbering boy Shane’s way. Shane initially diagnosed him as a clumsy Schizophrenic.

 

That was, until he collapsed again.

 

* * *

 

Ryan eventually was discharged with a clean bill of health, but as a person with a chronic condition, he had to visit the hospital again after several weeks to ensure his medications were working properly. Normally, Shane did not accept follow-up appointments, but the medical assistant had informed him, in that sly manner of hers, that Ryan specifically requested that he be the one to see him.  

 

Shane ignored the way his heart fluttered at the sight of the paranormal blogger seated on the examination room table. To his relief (and unwanted attraction), Ryan looked exceedingly healthy. Color was restored to his bronze skin. Thick, strong muscle wrapped around his chest and shoulders, stretching his t-shirt. Even his teeth glittered brilliantly in a huge grin.

 

“Hey doc,” Ryan greeted with a good-natured wave.

 

“Hey, how’re you feeling?” Shane took note of the bandage wrapped around the inside of his arm. “I see you already got your blood taken.”

 

“Yeah,” Ryan laughed. “Was a big boy and didn’t pass out, too. I deserve a lollipop.”

 

Shane didn’t want to think of the implications of that simple sentence, but his mind betrayed him with fantasies of Ryan on his knees, cherry-stained mouth wide open, tongue ready to stimulate his cock.

 

“Anything I should know about?” Shane coughed out after a moment.

 

Ryan shook his head. “Nope, I feel great.”

 

A moment of silence seemed to stretch on between them before Shane let out a breath of air and looked away. “Alright, great, well, I’ll check up on your bloodwork and get back to you.”

 

“Wait!” Ryan shouted.

 

Shane paused, gaze settling back on Ryan.

 

“M-my dad recently got diagnosed with a heart problem, and I was wondering if you could take a listen to my ticker, just to make sure everything is okay,” Ryan stuttered out.

 

Shane suppressed the need to roll his eyes. Instead, he unwound the stethoscope from his collar and approached the other man. “You’re young, relatively healthy, I don’t think -“

 

The doctor was so engrossed in his gentle admonishing that he didn’t realize Ryan had taken off his shirt until his eyes jumped from the tool in his grasp to his patient. His heart nearly gave out, and the irony was not lost on Shane.

 

“I-I could - you didn’t have to take off your shirt,” Shane mumbled.

 

Ryan shrugged.

 

Shane cocked his head to the side, but proceeded to place the instrument in his ears and the receiver on the steel wrapped in silk that was Ryan’s pectoral.

 

A gasp escaped Ryan’s plump lips. His eyes fluttered closed, long eyelashes dancing over the tops of his cheeks. He tossed his head back and released a shuddering breath. “It’s cold,” Ryan nearly moaned.

 

“Your heart is fine!” Shane squeaked before bolting out of the room.

 

(Never had he been so grateful for a private, lockable office, allowing him the time and space to ...relieve himself of his unflagging erection.)

* * *

  
That Friday, Shane received a notification on his phone indicating Ryan had updated his YouTube channel.

 

Shane contemplated unsubscribing to the channel. Ryan had already been diagnosed, so there was no longer a need to search through his videos for any stray symptom his team was simply not catching.

 

Then again, he needed to make sure there wasn’t anything amiss. Yes, they caught the correct diagnosis, but that didn’t mean Ryan was immune to a secondary ailment caused by his disease.

 

Within the privacy of his office, Shane watched the episode, only vaguely aware that it was about a medical mystery that had occurred in Riverside, California during the nineties. Rather, his laser focus was on Ryan, critical eyes on every move he made and every breath he took.

 

Ryan seemed fine, extraordinarily alert, energetic and healthy. Steadily, Shane became mesmerized by the way his lips formed his words, the gestures his hands made, the way his eyes sparkled when they looked directly into the camera, as if beckoning Shane to come to him.

 

Shane shut his laptop.

 

* * *

 

Shane’s patient continued to exhibit all of the symptoms of an allergic reaction, but without being near a known allergen. The hospital’s state-of-the-art Level Five clean room hadn’t helped this woman, who periodically could not breathe for the swelling of her throat. She was one more anaphylactic episode from death, and Shane was at a loss.

 

Frustrated, he put his head in his hands and tried his damndest not to focus on Ryan. No matter his willpower, melancholy dimmed every thought, and that was, in it of itself, a distraction.

 

Ugh! Why couldn’t he just be happy that Ryan’s last follow-up was that afternoon? Then, he could finally move on from this strange infatuation with him.

 

 _It isn’t strange_ , a voice (which sounded suspiciously like Sara’s) resounded in his head. Resolutely, it continued, _he’s a walking ray of sunshine, how could you not fall for him?_

 

Shane groaned against the forming memory.

 

Ryan, in his hospital bed, engrossed by televised basketball, gave his assigned nurse an enthusiastic play-by-play of what had happened during the game prior to her coming into the room. Shane, because he was as hungry as he was a dick, snuck behind the nurse to reach over and steal the pudding cup from Ryan’s tray. Unfortunately, the snack had not opened quietly; the aluminum top snapped open with a small pop.

 

“No!” Ryan had screamed as he leapt from the bed and to Shane. With a forceful slap, the cup had been knocked out of Shane’s grasp. Mood swings and aggression were added to the list of symptoms recorded in Shane’s head, before they were erased by Ryan asking him desperately, “Did you eat any of it?”

 

“No, why?”

 

Ryan gave a bellow if air and smiled, softening his prior frenzied expression. “Thank God,” he sighed. Before Shane could open his mouth to ask, Ryan answered his silent question, “The MIB are trying to poison my food. You almost died, Dr. Madej!”

 

At the time, Shane’s singular thought had been that such a delusion explained the elevated ketones in his urine tests: he hadn’t eaten since being admitted. He couldn’t have known that such a small interaction would spark an obsession the likes of which he had never known before. In spite of his inner monologue, his crush wasn’t a mystery.

 

Ryan cared about people in a way Shane hardly ever witnessed, even in his own hospital. The moment Ryan admitted that he hadn’t told his medical staff about the Men in Black because he was worried about their safety, Shane was all but addicted to Ryan.

 

Worse yet, much like his allergen patient, he didn’t have to be in the same room as Ryan to have that itch beneath his skin, his copper dream man already caught in the recesses of his brain.

 

_Wait…That’s it!_

 

Shane picked up his smart phone from his desk and dialed one of his residents. The very second she picked up, he ordered her to do an internal ultrasound of their patient’s uterus.

 

* * *

 

“You saved a woman’s life!” Shane greeted Ryan as soon as he walked through the clinic room door.

 

Ryan moved closer to the edge of the examination table and leaned forward. “Oh? How?”

 

Shane took a seat near Ryan and explained how he couldn’t figure out how a woman could possibly have an allergic reaction in a clean room, until he thought of the copper in Ryan’s system. “See, she came in after she got some blisters on her hands from washing copper cookware, but even after we gave her steroids, she just kept getting worse. We initially thought her body was just going haywire, until I thought of you and the copper in your system. That’s when I realized that she must have the allergen inside herself. Turns out she had a copper IUD inserted years ago and it perforated her uterus, causing her symptoms.”

 

Ryan’s eyes widened and his mouth parted. “Is she going to be okay?”

 

Shane chuckled under his breath; of course he would ask that. “Yeah, she’s going to be just fine.”

 

“That’s good,” Ryan exhaled out. He glanced down at his hands. Quietly, he added with a murmur, “I - uh, I’m glad thinking of me helped you.”

 

The slight smattering of pink upon the apples of Ryan’s cheeks was too much. Shane reached his goddamn limit!

 

Logically, Shane knew he should have asked first before leaping forward and nearly pouncing upon Ryan, pulling him into a heated kiss. Regardless, emotionally, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to regret the action; Ryan kissed him back just as fiercely, seemingly with a hunger for Shane’s lips.

 

Shane pulled away only to lock the examination room door.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos validated my existence! Thanks in advance :3 
> 
> Follow me on tumblr at @Faequill


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